 Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Contract, Packaging, Associations, and Webinar on Conventionally Planned Response, Helping Business Leaders and Organizations to Adapt and Thrive in the Face of Uncertainty. I am Ron Puvak, the Managing Director of CPA. Since 1992, CPA has been promoting the growth and welfare of members through its industry exposure and networking programs. CPA members are comprised of the nation's leading contract packages, manufacturers, or from all types of manufacturing and packaging functions for their brands. Ryan, would you go ahead and advance the first slide, please? We've been the voice of the industry since 1992. We serve the needs of the industry through continued education, market knowledge, customer relationships. One of our key components in our mission is education. Today's webinar is an ongoing commitment to the informed industry on innovation as well as to stimulate the audience. All of you currently are in mute. If you have any questions, please use the question box and we respond as may as can. We may also solicit feedback via electronic link. The webinar is being recorded and will be posted on the CPA website at ContractPackaging.org. We will follow up with a short survey after the webinar. We please ask you to take the survey and give us your feedback. Plus, we have some other opportunities that we'd like to get your feedback on. Today's presenters are Ryan Weiss, who's the president of Effective Performance Strategies and Dr. Dave Nykamp, a licensed clinical psychologist working in the field of organizational development and leadership design. Gentlemen, please take it away and thank you. So thank you very much for the introduction, Ron. And welcome, everyone. We're excited to have you all here. Just a bit of background on Dr. Dave and myself. I've been in the packaging industry for over 20 years. I worked in the adhesives industry for national adhesives and Henkel adhesives for about 17 years. And the past four years went out on my own and started effective performance strategies. I've moved seven times in 17 years, including to Asia and back two times. I ran a shared service center organization, the head of North America Operations for Henkel in the Philippines for almost three years. And in that role also was global head of continuous improvements. So had some work and some responsibility working with contract manufacturers and contract packages on our branded side of the business, but also was responsible primarily in the adhesives business. So did a lot of work in folding carton and flexible packaging and different parts of the packaging industry. But my primary focus over my career has always been on process improvement and helping organizations to make improvements. One of those things when we were in the Philippines, we didn't just do contingency planning and look at plans, but we actually had to implement on what we called our business continuity plan a number of times. In the Philippines, they have everything from volcanoes to earthquakes to disease. I got the mumps while I was there, even though I was vaccinated as a child. And we had hurricanes, they called them typhoons that came through and flooding due to poor infrastructure. And we were in one of the tallest buildings in downtown Makati. So we actually spent a lot of time doing contingency planning and executing on it. There were times when we were putting employees in hotel rooms to get internet access and to make sure that we were continuing the business as it needed to be continued. And so that's part of my background in terms of contingency planning and this contingency plan response program that we put together that we're going to share with you some key points about the impact in the packaging industry and also hope to get a roundtable discussion with some questions and comments from those of you on the line. So I'll turn it over to Dr. Dave if you can introduce yourself as well. Yeah, I'll just be brief. Yeah, my name is David at New Camp. I'm a licensed clinical psychology. I look at the question of why we do what we do. I've entered the world through the world of clinical psychology with that question and I've translated that into why we do what we do at work. Your customers, your employees, all of these are people and without people, you don't have a business, you don't have customers. So that's my focus. I like to say I'm a reformed musician and I study, born of that background, I study patterns and subsequently systems and disruptions in those systems. And that's what brings Ryan and I together as collectively or collaborating on how do you identify accurately, define them and rectify them so your system or organizations can be productive. Thank you, Ryan. Thank you, Dr. Dave. So I've got just a couple of slides here. That agenda we had up on the screen at the beginning about why EPS, why effective performance strategies, just talk through very briefly what our organization does. Over the past four years, I've led about 70 lean events and not just in terms of doing an event, but training events, facilitating and training folks and primarily in the packaging food service industry, aluminum, paper board, plastics and packaging food service with primary target markets. And so working with large to mid and smaller companies in helping them and making sure that we're doing the right things and doing things in the most efficient and effective way possible. My background, if you saw in the previous slide, was I've started four companies. I've founded four companies in my life, one of them when I was 16 years old. It's still run by my youngest brother today and he's turned it into much more successful business than I ever envisioned at the time. But this is one of my passions is helping organizations and helping leaders to facilitate and grow. So we've done a lot of these setup reduction type events. So change over times, how to rapidly and efficiently change a machine from one product to another. In some cases, there's significant savings in terms of dollar value. In other cases, it's much more about the flexibility to be able to change rapidly between products and generate capacity. And I think in the contract packaging world and the contract manufacturing world, that flexibility to adapt and to move between products becomes a very important part of what you do and how you operate. And so this is one of the types of projects that we do a lot of. And some of this is going on site and facilitating these types of events and training folks on how to do it. And in other times, well, one of the things in recent history is we're moving more and more towards the virtual setting. And we've created training templates and customizable templates to help deliver and to coach a lot more effectively without being on site. We also have done quite a few of these total productive maintenance events. And these don't typically have as high of an ROI for clients, but it's really about making sure your equipment is in a productive state. And that doesn't just mean that the equipment is functioning as it should. It's not just about oil changes, but it's about productivity and making sure that you're focused on not just the machine itself, but also the process of how you work with the machine. It's not just about going to Jiffy Lube and changing the oil, but it's also about riding with the driver, right? I've got a couple of 18-year-old children that just went through the driving lessons a couple of years ago and sitting in the car next to them and seeing them break very fast at stop signs, for example, often leads to the brakes wearing out faster. So those are things you wouldn't typically see in an oil change, but when you're doing total productive maintenance, it's much more about the equipment and the process of how you work with it. Also worked on quite a few of these quality events. Quality events are typically not focused on a hard dollar value, but in some cases they're much more focused on looking at saving a customer or being able to explain or drive improved quality to improve the customer experience. And so we've done a number of these events in terms of facilitation and driving for performance with organizations. So we also look at kind of where we're at today, right? This sort of brings us to this unemployment and the cultural change that's happening in America and globally today. I'm looking back over my 25 or so years of experience in industry and thinking about sort of the, you know, I've got the unemployment rate chart up here, but thinking about the dot com euphoria that burst, right? The dot com bubble burst, but it was very transformative in terms of culture, in terms of looking at, you know, the way we absorb information. My grandmother used to have a full set of encyclopedias and I once lost one of her encyclopedias when I took it to school and got in trouble for it, very memorable. But since the dot com bubble, there's been a cultural change in terms of how we absorb information. September 11th, before September 11th, I used to sit on small regional commuter jets and be able to see the pilots and their panel in the cockpit and we're not seeing that anymore. It changed the way that we travel as a culture. The financial crisis in 08 and 09 really transformed the way we look at the financial industry and real estate and loaning money and borrowing money. And now that brings us to today, the, you know, sort of unprecedented crisis in terms of what we've seen and what we've observed around this pandemic. And it's not just about the unemployment rate, there are cultural changes that are happening. The acceptance of people wearing masks in public, for example. The view of supply chain around, we see companies like Tyson Foods and Smithfield Foods needing to shut down plants to make sure that they're doing the right things and that their employees aren't all getting infected. We see a couple of my children work at a supermarket and the plexiglass and the mask wearing and the acceptance of these things that when I lived in Asia for almost five years, we'd normally and commonly see people walking around with masks on. But coming back to the United States, it's something you almost never saw up until a few months ago. And we started seeing that much more regularly. I'll also ask Dr. Dave maybe to comment, there was a thing on his profile earlier, a few months ago, he wrote a white paper about kinetic anxiety and kind of thinking about the more recent events of rioting and looting and things like that and how those things might be related. So Dr. Dave, if you could comment on that for a moment. Yeah, kinetic anxiety is a pent up, unresolved fear. We'll talk a little bit about this. So this is just a primer. There's fear that's real and fear that's perceived and that leads to a fight, flight or free syndrome. We'll talk a little bit about that. But in order to grow and develop, we must all take risks as the slide indicates and Ryan will say more about that. But the kinetic anxiety is when it's all pent up and it builds connect energy so that once it's triggered it can just explode. And this is what we're seeing with respect to the rioting in the streets nationally. We can avoid that. And that's clearly a disruption. And we wanna take those disruptions or avoid them as we can and redirect that energy elsewhere to be productive. So thanks Dr. Dave. And one of the things that we observe, right? In terms of how people are reacting to risk is how consumer behaviors changed. On March 13th, I was driving back from a client to actually a packaging company in the Cincinnati area back to my home in Western Chicago suburbs. And I was listening to the news and I was listening to, I actually heard some things about how alcohol sales had started spiking, right? And that an ammunition and gun sales were spiking. And there's a Cabela's shop on the route and I pulled off and I went inside just to take a look. I didn't buy anything but the parking lot was full at three o'clock on a Friday afternoon. And as I went in and walked around the gun counter was full of people and people were looking at and buying ammunition. So there are clearly people who jump into that fight mode and that's evidenced in consumer behaviors. The freeze mode that Dr. Dave talked about of alcohol sales in April jumped by about 70%. The people are freezing and freezing in place. And then there were people who went in the flight mode looking at the toilet paper industry and the empty store shelves of toilet paper of people saying, I'm gonna stay home for a long time. I need to buy these things. So there are certain dynamics going on in our culture and in the mindset of how things are changing that will change packaging. In fact, Dr. Dave and I first met about six months ago at a flavoring company here in Geneva, Illinois. And we've continued and developed our relationship over time but we were just there again this morning. And the owner of this company was talking about the increase in sales that they've seen, the increase in sales that they've experienced as a result of people, consumers shopping in the middle of the supermarket again. So this leads sort of to this framework for contingency plan response. Those steps that you can take to recognize that you have a problem, to stop and view that I have a problem, to then move into a plan, how am I going to plan? How am I going to move forward? And then we need to get back to adapting. We're gonna adapt our business, whether it's putting up Plexiglass or it's putting in place using infrared temperature scanners for all the employees coming to our shop or having actually infrared cameras out front and making sure that people are coming in and they're healthy, right? There are things that are happening culturally in our society that they're kind of moving through these steps that we need to recognize we have a problem, create a plan, adapt, and then get back to those sort of blue skies and blue ocean that we were experiencing before. So one of the things that can happen is sort of this financial prioritization that as business leaders, as organizations, we need to think about things like cashflow and income and equity. And I like to think about these from my MBA and finance days where we talk about these three different ways of measuring finances and the health of a business that cashflow is really like oxygen, that if I'm getting up every morning and the first thing I'm doing is checking the cash in my bank account to make sure I can make payroll, I'm going to make different decisions than if I have plenty of oxygen to survive and plenty of water to drink. And I'm really just looking at building equity and I'm eating cheeseburgers or maybe even steak. And so there are different places that we may be in as business leaders and business owners in terms of, are we breathing oxygen? Are we needing water to drink? Or are we really in a place where we're building equity? So when we talk about prioritization and we talk about clarity around prioritization, there are risks that we may need to stop and recognize. There may be changing market conditions. So we've already talked about a few of those things in the packaging market. There could be supply chain disruptions, things like Tyson Foods and Smithfield Foods that we've observed. There may be credit availability. Back in the financial crisis, that was the biggest risk for many organizations, loss of key personnel. One of the examples here may not just be long-term loss of personnel, but also short-term. That packaging company in Cincinnati that I was driving back from, in the month of April, they had 35% of their employees not show up for work. So loss of key personnel can be another area of prioritization. Safety and security breach, the flavoring company was talking this morning, the CEO was talking about how safety and security has changed and how as leaders and business leaders, we need to lead by example in terms of safety and security. Also things like physical assets or legal liabilities. So as a business leader, as a business owner, prioritization becomes one of the most important things. But it's not just about you prioritizing in your office alone. There's a prioritization process that's really important and really effective to make an impact, to prioritize with your team, to include them, not just to say I'm going to prioritize and tell them what my priorities are, but when you include your team, when you include other team members in prioritization, it starts to enhance accountability and enhance buy-in from those people. But you need to really clearly identify what are your priorities and what are those risks and how do you define those as an organization? So this becomes a really important part of contingency planning and contingency responses. So we'll also talk just a bit about sort of habits, right? If we go back before March 13th, if we go back to maybe January or February and think about the habits that we had, and habits I define as people and process, the way the individual interacts with the processes around them, you may have gotten up in the morning and grabbed your Starbucks coffee and gone to the office and opened your laptop and read your emails. You had some sequence of habits throughout the day, but that all changed. And in that change, in that disruption, it's really important to consider what's my purpose, right? Why does our organization exist? Why do I feel this is important? When habits are changing and being disrupted, this is a single most important point at which you can change for the better. And one of the examples that we give of this, about eight months ago, I was approached by one of the large chemical companies and they asked me to modernize the training within the industry program of the US government in the 1940s. And I thought it was an odd request at the time, but I started researching about Rosie the Riveter and started researching about the dynamics that happened in World War II was going on and women were coming into the workforce for the first time into technical jobs and the way the dynamics changed in terms of the purpose, right? That we need to win this, right? We need you to be part of this. And the messaging that went on around Rosie the Riveter was a very clear and very powerful message around purpose and the people, people were changing. People's habits had been disrupted. And that also brings us to process. So the thing that I focus on the most is really around process, but I've come to appreciate over the past 20 years how absolutely critical it is to understand the purpose and the people if we're going to change those habits, if we're going to improve performance, all three of these need to work together in a very powerful way. And this is exactly why I mentioned in prioritization, you need to make sure that you're including the right people when you're doing that prioritization, not just doing it in isolation. And that starts leading us to sort of a mitigation plan. So thinking about things like key milestones, how am I going to manage projects? How am I going to manage through this? As some of you may have been slow during this period, some of you may have been going crazy with lots and lots of work because customers are buying consumable products in packages. But as we're going through the COVID and now the pent up anxiety that Dr. Dave talked about and moving towards, you know, we have rioting and things going on, we need to be putting those mitigation plans into place with some key milestones and action plans and developing a communication plan. So this is sort of the framework as we go through this. So we've got a couple more slides here and then we're going to get into some more interactive discussion and round table discussion. One of the things you want to think about in terms of the context and where your organization is at today and where your organization wants to get to, we can think about the example of changing a tire on the side of the road. And when you're changing a tire on the side of the road, you've got a lot of problems, right? It's not a very efficient process. It might take me 15, 20, maybe 30 minutes and I may make some mistakes. I may jack the car up and then try to loosen the lug nuts and realize that I can't do that and I need to lower the car again so the tires in contact with the ground. So we think about the context of changing a tire on the side of the road and the pain that we experience. But we can also think about an auto mechanic at that Firestone dealership or at a Jiffy Lube or at where they're changing tires in a car. It's a different context for the same task or a Formula One race team on the racetrack. If we think about these three contexts and three scenarios, we have different tools, right? On the side of the road, I've got sort of that wobbly wrench that I'm using to jack up the car and I've got difficulty with the lug nut wrench that I've got there. But if I went to the auto mechanic, they've got better tools. They've got air compressors and they've got deep tools. But the Formula One race team has outstanding tools, right? They have the best tools that you can possibly have to do this job. The second one is the skills. When I'm stuck on the side of the road, I've changed about four tires in my entire life in 40 years. I don't do it very often. The auto mechanic does it daily. The pit crew trains for it, right? They actually train for it and they look to make perfection. And finally, it's mindset. If I'm stuck on the side of the road and I'm ticked off and I'm not happy because I'm late getting to a customer or I'm late getting home for dinner, I'm not all that excited about it. But the Formula One pit crew, they're pumped up. Their goal is to hit one and a half seconds or two seconds. The auto mechanic, I kind of put as neutral, right? They're there, it's their job, it's what they do. So I'd like you, all of you to sort of reflect and think about where is your organization at today? Where are you at today in terms of moving through this process and getting to where you're gonna adapt and restart your business and get back to where you're smooth sailing again? Are you stuck because you don't have the right tools or your team is missing some tools? Are you stuck because of skills or is it mindset? And this can be a really challenging and really sort of painful thing to think about and to ask. And finally, this kind of moves us towards adapting. With our organization, we need to execute, right? We need to have some open communication and drive commitment and accountability for the people on our team. My brother is the director for the water department in the city of Elgin. And at the very beginning of this, he started to freeze within decision that he had so many decisions to make about making sure he had 90 days of chemical at all of his facilities. And all of these types of things running through his brain and it became very difficult to make decisions. And so we talked through some of these sayings around having open communication with his team, thinking about those underutilized resources you have on your teams and making sure that you're prioritizing together, not prioritizing in your own office, but that helps you to drive commitment and accountability with your team. And finally, you can do innovation. Sometimes necessity they say is the mother of invention. And we've seen quite a variety of innovations happening over the past couple of months as we've been going through this, that we see micro breweries that are making, switching over to making hand sanitizer. We see organizations that are pushing and pushing their mobile apps to order food so that there's less contact between the consumer and the people producing. So I'd encourage all of you to think about in the context of your business, not just getting back to normal, not just getting back to life as it was, but also the opportunity for innovation. And I understand in contract packaging and contract manufacturing, there's a lot of opportunity in terms of hand sanitizer market that's kind of exploded, right? Or things like that, that may be enabling your organization to drive and to thrive as you move forward. So as we kind of transition into this round table facilitation, I'd like to first open up if there are questions, if people have any questions about what we've discussed so far. And if not, then we can go into some questions that we can put out there to get you thinking and to maybe facilitate some of the discussion. So I'll see if, does anybody put any, if you have any chat questions, you're welcome to put them in here. We have one question, Ryan. Okay. The question is, what are you seeing as some of the most common issues currently and what are your recommendations to solve them? Yeah. So, and maybe I'll defer to Dr. Dave first in terms of he's seen some anxiety and some of those things and maybe give some tools around that. And then I'll comment more directly to you at the packaging. So Dr. Dave, do you have any comments? Let's move back to the real and perceived note of fear. I've seen a lot of that present itself. And as a reference point for the audience, a perceived threat is most notably recognized with post-traumatic stress disorder where they're originated with a real threat but is activated by a perceived threat much later. People do this as well as organizations. And the organizations that I have the pleasure of working with are experiencing some of this and the conversations that we have to have are a point of definition and clarity, specifically around is this a real threat and is it or is it a perceived threat? Now, these are not dichotavously polarized. You can have an element of both. The cost to define this is time from a manufacturing perspective and the benefit is increased efficiency. If you take the time to clearly define is it real or is it perceived and what combination? Albeit that's a cost of time. If you're able to clarify that you can then engage in round table discussions. You can identify what needs to be internalized via the purpose or the commitment. What needs to be measured in terms of the accountability and then move forward together. On the note of fear and real and perceived we have the fight, flight or freeze. Really what we wanna do is we wanna seize the opportunity, what we must do together. A catchphrase that Ron and I have come to is there's no way out but through and the only way through is together. The first inclination is for us to hold up and protect and become selfish and blunt terms. But to do so isolates us and further prevents us from growing and becoming more efficient and discussing with others what we actually need to do. So I would suggest that you collect yourselves. Those that you trust, those that you know will give you feedback that's honest but not brutal and ultimately come to a conclusion that is productive for your organizations whether at the micro level or at the macro. That's what happened with Rosie Derivator in World War II. Yeah, so thank you for that Dr. Dayes. So one of the things I'll sort of open up and then I'll answer this question. For any of you who are on the call who can, if you can go on your cell phone to menti.com, m-e-n-t-i.com and it's gonna ask you to put in a code and you just put in the six digit code that's up there at the top of the screen, 12, 29, 24. This is completely confidential. So we're not asking, it's not recording anything. You don't have to download an app or anything like that. You can also do it on your computer if you'd like. But if you go there and we've got a couple of questions here that I think will help facilitate some of the discussion. But so Ron, to the question that you asked, I think the three, I wrote down a couple notes here while Dr. Dave was speaking. I think the three things I've seen in terms of packaging, in terms of problems are, I would say personnel issues. So I alluded to the attendance issue for that client in Cincinnati that it wasn't just them. They're part of a large organization and there were other sites that they had pretty significant attendance issues, not because people had gotten COVID but because people were afraid of getting it and so people weren't coming to work. So I think attendance was one of the really big things. I think the second piece of that is the anxiety. I've talked to some business leaders who are really struggling with that fight, flight or freeze that their team is in and struggling with communicating and clearly communicating with their employees. And so I think those two things are really important, are really critical to make sure you're communicating and make sure you're listening to what the employees are telling you. This Mentimeter tool is something that I've used in a variety of scenarios, a variety of settings. Actually used this with the big aluminum company when we were going through and they were changing their medical plan and used this as an anonymous way to facilitate groups of people to be able to get feedback about things that sometimes those silent people, sometimes those frozen people who aren't moving very fast or who are frozen with indecision to get their feedback because they may not always be outspoken in a setting. So that's one way to make sure you're connecting with your employees and communicating with them. Make sure that you understand where they're at. You wanna meet your employees where they're at. Are they in that fight mode? Are they running away or are they frozen with indecision and making sure you clarify that? The second area I see in terms of packaging, there've been some supply chain disruptions and some of those fortunately have been pretty short-term spikes but some of the supply chain disruptions have created some havoc but they've always also created some opportunity. So I mentioned some of the meat packing plants earlier. We used to sell a lot of adhesives into those facilities but I'm also involved with some farm to table companies and looking at the direct to consumer models, there's some innovation going on. There are farmers who are coming together and processing the hogs that they're being told to slaughter and they're putting up small processing facilities to adapt. And I think this is one of the ways for you to look at it. And the third area is demand. I think in packaging, I don't think that overall there's been a decline in demand but I think what we're seeing is more of a shift in demand. And so the flexibility as a packaging company to be able to adapt and to be able to utilize your equipment in ways that you can move between bottling certain things or creating cartons for certain types of goods, those types of things having that flexibility to adapt is absolutely critical in terms of moving forward. So Ron, does that answer the question that you asked? Yeah, I think it is. That came from one of our audience members. There's another one here and it has to do with, I think the fourth step process was monitoring. I don't think we talked in great detail about that. And the question kind of is, where do you develop the things you monitor and what are the metrics and where do you develop those metrics if you are monitoring in the process? Right, great question. And yeah, so we didn't focus as much on that because we're kind of coming out of this but absolutely that's the key to that fourth step of monitoring. And I have some very strong opinions and beliefs about metrics and how people react to metrics and they move forward with them. And one of those examples, when I moved to the Philippines, I had 180 people with computers looking at me. And on day one, I really wasn't quite sure even what all of them did. I had worked for the organization for a decade at that point. But I wasn't that familiar with the specific tasks of what the people were doing. And what we developed was three core metrics for each of the teams. We had eight teams and I asked each of the managers to put up three key metrics on a very common bulletin board that was right outside of my office. And I asked them to all come and update on a monthly basis what those metrics were and have a small team meeting around that bulletin board. And that sounds sort of, that maybe sounds more like the 1940s than 2016. But in reality, there's a lot of power in terms of having metrics be very visible and have them be manually updated. The attention that people pay to those metrics is really important. But to your question, Ron, about how to pick those metrics, I actually had the managers identify those metrics. We had a huge, a massive database of metrics for all kinds of financial and supply chain metrics. But I asked my managers to develop for their team three key metrics, one around quality, one around productivity and one around value. And there was a lot of resistance. It took us probably a year, a year and a half to get to where everybody was consistently doing this and had metrics in mind. And I chose those three categories for a reason. That is, I wanted to see those metrics in those categories improve. And, but I put it on the managers, the people closer to the process to come back to me with which were the right metrics for their department, for their group. And the reason becomes ownership. The thing we talked about earlier that when they developed, when they came back to me and said, these are the three metrics we're going to improve, their team was passionate about improving those three metrics. I didn't have to go out of my office and monitor those three metrics every day. Their teams were the ones who wanted to improve them because the other teams in the office were able to see and visibly kind of, it created some a little bit of competition without making it official. And so I think there's a lot of importance to having the people who are doing the process, having the people who are managing the process set those metrics in line with what's important. Because at the end of the year, if they picked the wrong metric and they continue having problems all year long and they're not making progress, then there's some accountability to them. So that's sort of the monitoring process, right? I would encourage people to think about a framework and think about engaging folks because our company spent an enormous amount of money doing all kinds of electronic things around a data cube, if you will. But the impact and the power of changing people's habits is really what you don't want to lose. So great questions there. Yeah, to add to that, Ryan, automation is part of our life, but it is not culture in and of itself. And it's culture that's really going to, from which we draw, what metrics do we really need to attend to? And the people on the front lines, your managers, your line workers, they're the ones who are gonna be best informed to tell you and you have to have a really good culture to solicit that rich information. It will cost you time, but in the end, it'll make the process far more accurate and efficient. Great comments. Are there any other questions, Ron, or we'll keep kind of moving on here? Just go ahead and keep moving on, and it's another more pop-up, I'll get them in. Fantastic. So all right, so I appreciate the input here from kind of what you're looking forward to, no more masks and travel and camaraderie. And I think probably all of us can resonate with some of these comments. So I appreciate these comments that you all have put up here. And we're gonna ask a couple other questions that I'd like to hopefully prompt some discussion with. So if you sort of think about the question, how has COVID impacted your stakeholders? So each of us in our lives has sort of employees and friends and family and customers and suppliers. Would you say that COVID, this whole situation, has had a huge impact or a minimal impact? So we'll give you just a moment to answer this question. If you're following along on your phone or laptop, if you need to still join the menti.com and put in that six digit code. I'll hide the results, I probably should have hidden them earlier, hide the results so people can respond here quickly and get a few results in here. While we're waiting on that, on the note of metrics and the like and automation, information is important and relevant, but it's in and of itself is flat unless it's applied and it's only applied through the culture and the people with whom you're operating. So data is helpful, but it's in and of itself irrelevant unless it's effectively understood, applied, integrated, and subsequently learned. Great point, Dr. Dave. Go ahead. Yes, sir, Bill, go ahead, go ahead. You had an example at the beginning, someone has brought this up. Your brother had multiple problems, many, many problems. What's been your experience, how people can relate to multiple problems? What are they normally boiled down to? What's the top two, top three? I know there's prioritization, but if you have seven problems, you're not gonna attack them all at once. What has been your experience of how people kind of get to this smaller list or attack? Right, yeah, great question. And so this is actually, there's some symbolism in the logo that we use, right? You've got kind of the stop sign, right, is the red color, a yield sign is yellow or orange. You've got a green circle is go and the blue kind of parallelogram is sort of monitoring and accelerating or moving forward. And the reason that I think this is relevant to the question here is that if you think about a stop sign, there's eight points there. And one of the things that Dr. Dave and I have talked about a number of times and is when the human mind, so Dr. Dave, if you wanna give any technical stuff here, but the human mind can't think about too many things at once, right? We're actually need to be very focused. The stop sign has eight points on it. And the way I view this is sometimes we feel overwhelmed and we are overwhelmed because we feel that there's just, there's so many things coming out of us that we just don't know what to do next. And that's the symbolism of the stop sign that we need to stop. We need to recognize that that's where we're at. And then we move towards the yield sign, which is the second step in this process, the yield sign having three points that if you can make some priorities and you can with your team create three key points, three key priorities of where you're going to go and how you're gonna get there, then you could be much more effective. And this is actually part of the reason that when I was in the Philippines and we had, I gave them quality productivity and value as their three metrics I wanted to see was that people can't concentrate on eight points or 16 points or 100 points, but they can concentrate on three. And in the human mind seems much more capable of doing that. And that then when you get to the green circle, right? You have a single point, you can delegate and start moving that responsibility out in a way that people can be focused and it can actually take action. And so appreciate that question. Dr. Dave, do you have any technical stuff on sort of the human brain there? Actually, not so much about the neurology, but about being overwhelmed. Being overwhelmed is when our resources are breached, when the responsibilities are in excess of our resources. And that's where collaboration really plays because we all get overwhelmed because we're all individually limited and subsequently operating in teams, understanding your compliments within that team and activating them really reduces our sense of real and perceived threats because we're better able to engage them. So in the end, it's all about the relationships internally so that we can service the relationships that we call customers extra. Sure, excellent. So okay, so I appreciate the responses here and part of the reason I like to ask this question is that people are in different places and I think it's really important for us to stop and have that recognition that not everybody's in the same place. Some of us, and actually the CEO this morning that we were talking to, he actually sort of made reference to this, that he has personal beliefs about mask learning or not mask wearing, but as a leader, right? He felt that it was very important in his organization that he leads by example. And sometimes it's about the, what it's not what I say, but it's what I do that the people are going to observe the most. And so I think it's really important for all of us to sort of take a step back when we're feeling anxiety or when we're concerned or when you're thinking about the different stakeholders in our lives to sort of recognize, we have some bimodal distributions here. We have some of you are saying your employees were not very impacted. There's other people who have answered this at a five, right? You can kind of see the curves here that so some of the folks on the call, you feel you've had a huge impact on your employees and others are saying not so much. And some of you are saying myself, I've had a huge impact or others are saying not so much. And I think especially when we see this kinetic anxiety that Dr. Dave talked about earlier that in the polarization of some things happening in our society that we sort of recognize this and appreciate it. And as a leader, we make certain decisions based on the understanding that not everybody's in the same place that we are and not everybody's in even in the same place as each other in terms of impact and in terms of reaction to it. So we'll move into another question here which are you most concerned about disrupting your business today? So this one's a little prioritization. You can move the comments or the answers there. You can move the ones to the top that are the highest priority or highest impact. Dr. Dave, do you have any other comments on the previous one? No, I think we're good. We just, we really, well, okay. The one comment I have is we are all looking forward to just getting back to our relationships. I know the previous slide, family vacations, connecting, this disruption has resulted in the recommendation of not connecting. When I thought, well, that's gonna just create all kinds of problems for a lot of different people because human beings are designed to be connected. So stay connected in whatever fashion. That would be my one comment. Great, great comments. Yeah, I think that's really an important part of it. And I think, looking back at sort of at the beginning of everything, people were all excited about Zoom and about we had a weekly family game night with my parents, right? I think it was important to stay connected through all of that and to make sure we stayed communicating, but there certainly has, to some extent, been some burnout and been some challenges with some of the virtual stuff. I think going back to the first question we asked about what are you most looking forward to and getting haircuts and going out to eat and things are pretty important to all of us. But I think that human connection becomes really important and really an important part of what we're doing. So here we'll look at some of the responses here, some of the answers. So some of the top things that folks are concerned about disrupting business today. So some of the priorities, some of the things you have on your mind, changing market conditions. And I think this goes along with some of what I said earlier, but some of you may be experiencing it in different ways. But the comments that I'm hearing from the packaging industry are that things like pre-packaged foods have been great sellers in the supermarkets, things like produce on the outside of the shopping experience, the outside of the supermarket have kind of been struggling in the supermarket industry because people are looking at and thinking about these farm to table type things. So I see some opportunities growing there. Crane's Chicago business had an article on it just last week about how some of these organizations are on fire, right? They're going crazy. And so it's really going back to fight, flight or freeze, how are you adapting your business to meet those changing market conditions? And then lots of key personnel I think is an important one. The things we're seeing in terms of personnel and the dynamics there are really, really top of mind for folks. And then safety and security, I think that's been a common theme as well. And not just physical security from the sense that I want to keep people out of my plant but also sort of the health dimension of that. Any other questions popping up, Ron, as we go or we'll kind of put one more question up here. We're good. All right, put one more question up here to kind of think about your organization's strength in the following areas. So if you sort of think about your organization in terms of your purpose, your vision, who you are as an organization, the people that are in your organization, the process that you have or the performance that you're getting out of what you're trying to do. If you sort of rank those from, you have opportunities to improve, to very strong, it'd be interesting to see. I'd be curious to ask the audience, what problems are you incurring directly? And what have you tried that's been effective or ineffective? The ineffective ones aren't necessarily bad but they're opportunity use to learn. I'd be curious as to what comments our audience might have regarding those two questions. Yeah, excellent questions. So folks can put that in the chat box and see if we get some comments on that. So excellent. So kind of thinking about those four dimensions that we talked about early on in this, the purpose, people, process and performance, that equation is really, the way those three things link together, the purpose, people and process is really what can drive you to a higher performance. And if we sort of think about that Rosie, the Riveter example, where they were making tens of thousands of munitions a day and they wanted to get to hundreds of thousands or millions, there was a clear purpose and they were able to motivate and incentivize people around that. The people who came into the workforce were coming in and understanding that purpose. They linked to it. And finally the process, how do you onboard folks? How do you get them involved in the process? A big thing that comes out of training within industry was how to train people in technical and non-technical jobs very efficiently and effectively. And that's a core part of some of the modernization we did around that to organizations that need to scale up quickly or scale down quickly. How do you adapt your organization and how do you sort of move forward? So I'll leave you with a couple of closing thoughts as we come up close to an hour here. This is actually a quote that's on a mug in one of my clients here in the Chicago land area. Lindsay has this mug on her desk that says, people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And I think it's really important for everyone who's on this call, for everyone who's involved in business leadership and packaging too. And even working with the brands that you work with. The brands are really about messaging and trying to connect emotionally with their customers. And they often do that through packaging. And I think that's a really important element of the packaging world. But keep that in mind. I think it says relevant today if not more relevant than it was when Teddy Roosevelt said it. So we'll leave you with a couple of next steps. I know Ron mentioned they're gonna be sending out a follow-up survey. He's asked me to put together a more in-depth workshop. So we're gonna ask you a couple of things around which workshop you'd be most interested in. We've got a couple of options around prioritization and around how to improve and instruct your employees in a better way to get them more effective and efficiently. But the next steps we'll kind of leave you with today are to connect. So we'd encourage you to reach out. Send me an email if you'd like and love to connect with you and talk with you more about where your organization is at and what challenges you're facing or how we can be of assistance in that. The second is to clarify and prioritize. So we've got some prioritization templates but it's not just about a template. There's a process there. And using things like Mentimeter in a way that's neutral for your employees you can do it in a staff meeting. And most people have smartphones that can get out and answer a few questions. Some of those people who are quiet, we need their voices to be heard. We need to clarify what challenges our employees, suppliers, customers are feeling and so engage with our teams. And finally, create value. I encourage you to think about the value you can create for your customers, employees, family, faith, your communities, what value can you create and how can you engage the stakeholders who are important in your life. This is really important in times like this. And so I'd encourage all of you to do that and sincerely welcome your feedback about the webinar and what those future workshops might look like where we get into some more technical detail to help you facilitate. So any other questions, Ron, as we wrap up here? No, we don't have any other questions and I wanna thank both you and Dr. Dave. So, Ron and Dr. Dave, thank you very much for your assistance today and going through this is very interesting and we'll look at the follow-up and hopefully we'll get some folks to be interested in the follow-up workshops and some of the other things we have planned. So thank you guys. Thank all of you who've been on the call today. It's been great and take care and stay safe as we like to say these days, right? So everybody be well. Thank you, Ron. Thanks. Thank you.